1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to scanners, and more particularly, to a high speed scanner that operates in a manner similar to a conventional digital camera for capturing the image of a document that is to be scanned.
2. Background Art
As used herein, the term xe2x80x9cimagexe2x80x9d shall mean the image or text on a document that is to be scanned by a scanner.
Conventional scanners are provided with line sensors that are driven by a motor to scan the image one line at a time. There are several disadvantages that are experienced by such conventional scanners. First, the motor generates undesirable noise.
Second, the scanning speed is slow is because the image needs to be scanned one line at a time. For higher resolution scanners, the scanning speed may be even slower since each image will have more lines to be scanned.
Third, most conventional scanners communicate with the personal computer (PC) via the printer port or USB 1.1. This communication speed is also very slow (about 6 Mb/sec.), so that even increasing the scanning speed will not help significantly in increasing the overall speed of scanning and processing an image.
Fourth, the cost of the conventional scanner is very high because many of its components are quite costly. For example, the sensor is costly, and the high-speed image processing (often done by digital signal processing (DSP)) can also be expensive to implement.
Thus, there still remains a need for a high-speed and inexpensive scanner that can capture accurate images.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a scanner that can scan images and process the scanned images at high speeds.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a scanner that does not utilize a motor.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a scanner that communicates with a processing or storage device at high speeds.
To accomplish the objectives of the present invention, there is provided a scanner having a housing, a glass piece positioned over the housing and covering portions of the interior of the housing, with the glass piece adapted to support an image to be scanned. The scanner further includes a sensor positioned inside the housing below the glass piece, and a light source positioned inside the housing below the glass piece in a manner to direct a light beam at the glass piece so that the light beam is reflected off the glass piece and is received by the sensor to capture the image to be scanned. As a result, the entire image is captured at the same time by the sensor.